Probably the worst World Cup ever but at the same time for lads of my vintage the best. Certainly the best time as an Ireland fan. Was just at the perfect age (12). 88 was slightly too young to take it in properly, while 94 and 02 was still class but just not quite the same, although 02 had the bonus of drinking in the pub.
Off the Ball doing a 20 year anniversary special on Monday night. Apparently yer man Declan Lynch from the Sindo has a book out about it too. Cunt of a man but I’ll be buying it.
Would love to see more clips from RTE from the time like this, specifically Dunphy throwing his pen after Egypt game, haven’t seen it since.
I had the WC 90 Sticker Album. Think Gullit and Hughton were on the front battling it out for possession. That was back in the days before money completely poisoned the game.
There were three sticker albums I remember for three different levels of society. The Star had one for the cream crackers, with panini catering for the middle orders and that Brian Clough binder one for the toffs.
My love for stickers was slightly running out of steam by then having been mad into them from Mexico 86 through panini’s Football 87,88 and 89. Never actually managed to fill any of them completely.
Superb. I was at my end of sticker collecting then. Someone else said it before, WC 86 was unreal, had a quick look for it there but couldn’t find it. English League Div 1 in 1985/86 would have been one of the better ones too. Didn’t fill it but I remember Charlton Athletic’s crest badge being rare enough and one of the lads giving me over 150 stickers for it.
Any self respecting 10 year old had all three albums. The Star album had these big spaces inside where you’d have to place six stickers beside each other to make one big picture. World Cup 90 stickers were better than Panini ones because they were action photographs whereas the Panini ones were just the face of the player posing for the camera. Which is boring. I filled about two thirds of The Star album and half the Panini one but World Cup 90 was the big one. I got 4 pounds pocket money one week and went straight down the local shop and got 16 packets of the things. The seeds of my OCD had already begun to sprout.
Denmark were included in World Cup 90 as it went to press before the last round of qulifiers and the publishers must have assumed the Danes would make it. Funny enough they were included in the Panini one for Euro 92 as well because Yugoslavia looked like they might have to pull out from an early stage. Italy were included as well because they would have got the Soviet Union’s place if they had pulled out.
I still have the Esso World Cup coins which I think Roddy Doyle writes about in that article and an Italia 90 mug. In the summer of 1990 a couple of weeks after the World Cup finished me and my family were in Amsterdam and my then seven year old brother saw this World Cup shaped bottle of wine on display in the window of an Italian restaurant. Had the map of the world etched into it and all. He pestered my parents to go back and get it. When we got home we painted it with gold metallic paint so it looked just like the World Cup. Still have it too.
The joys of Panini World Cup sticker collecting revealed. Guardian Journalists James Richardson and Sid Lowe are also avid collectors and are even doing it again this tournament.
One of the Guardian podcasts pre-tournament had a funny little piece about the stickers. They’d one of the correspondents on the phone and he goes: well I find collecting the stickers is a great way to get to know the players, for instance, I know that Kim of North Korea is rubbish cos I’ve got him three times already.
He sounded like a child with the giddy head on him. Very funny.
Yea, I believe that was the aforementioned Sid Lowe. It was also rumoured that some of the Nth Koreans didnt have stickers because they hadn’t facilitated pictures. Richardson was getting around the problem of an adult buying sticker albums by making his kid fill it in.
Brilliant goal alright, ridiculously small crowd at the game, wouldn’t have copped things like that at the time. Where would the Yugoslavia fans waving flags have been from, Serbia?
Also agreed with ya in the end on Declan Lynch book, farmer. Flicked through it in the bookshop but just thought him too big of a cunt to actually pay money for it.
Yea, I believe that was the aforementioned Sid Lowe. It was also rumoured that some of the Nth Koreans didnt have stickers because they hadn’t facilitated pictures. Richardson was getting around the problem of an adult buying sticker albums by making his kid fill it in.